In this interview, Mr. Satish Jha, founder and chairman of OLPC India Foundation discusses some of the hotly debated questions and controversies surrounding the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project – a foremost dream project of the ICT4D sector and the development sector as a whole.
Zunia: It’s 2012, and the XO laptop still costs $199 - so far not down to the original $100 goal of the OLPC’s initiators. Since January 1995 when the OLPC was officially formed, the cost of technology has gone down dramatically. We also have vibrant open source volunteer communities worldwide. Governments and charities have backed up procurement and funding of XO in several occasions.
Then what’s the root cause behind missing the $100 milestone till today?
Satish Jha: Cost of technology creation is generally exogenous to the aspirations we may have. It requires technological leaps to find a new level of functionality and costs that go with it. OLPC was announced as a $100 laptop in 2005 and conceived as that a couple of years before that. That was in response to the prevailing prices of technology then. At the time, a PC was about $1000 and a laptop used to cost a little more.
If we look at the baseline OLPC, without the tablet features, for an order of 10 million pieces the manufacturers can still get it down to $100 as its cost of production. Adding the features like laptop cum tablet, a sun readable screen, a mesh networking environment, making it rugged, making it a low power computer are each a leap that were made with OLPC. So while it is possible to create a $100 laptop, there is another principle that is key to learning and that is about a holistic computer that engages a child, is fun to learn with and that is what has kept OLPC's cost of production around $200. But the irony is that the distribution and taxes alone add up another $100 per piece when it is brought to India.
That said, OLPC just announced a new tablet that is revolutionary in more ways than one. Even that will cost more than $100 because technologies have not come to the next round to reduce prices below that just yet. A comparable computer on the other hand will still go for a few times higher price point.
There are other ways of seeing the $100 perception as well. What is the value of $100 of 2005 in 2011? And the third generation of XO is several times more powerful and consumes half the power and the price point remains the same $200, almost like $100 of 2005.
Secondly, OLPC is not just a laptop. It comes with all the software a child needs and just to buy that in the market place will cost way more than the price of OLPC. It saves electricity by 90%+ and that alone can pay for its cost over 5 years. Its maintenance free and works where nothing else works. For someone seeing it over a 5 year time frame, OLPC is more than free a few times over. To create the ecossystem that OLPC offers as a seamless standard will clearly cost a few times more than the cost of OLPC.
Open source and free software are also not as free as they sound. Good software needs the best of minds and they need to be paid. Good software requires much deeper insights, greater experience and an ability to innovate beyond the normal as well. Maintaining that also requires organization and a business model to support it. Governments only pay for what they procure and non profit Foundations have been a marginal contributor to the diffusion of OLPC so far.
We hope everyone sees what the world is missing out on because a billion children have no hope of any meaningful education and given an opportunity they could contribute to the world as much as any. That gap alone should be a huge trigger to scale up and bring down the cost of computing for learning. If we achieve the scale of 100 million annual, the cost of OLPC may touch $100 as well.
Zunia: Two sides of an argument – “Just putting a computer in a school and having students interact with it does not actually contribute to educational outcomes” Vs. “In developing countries, because teacher absenteeism is such a problem, that at least a computer is better than no teacher at all” – what’s the Indian experience in this regard?
Satish Jha: The way education is understood today in developing countries is, in a manner of speaking, centuries old. It has contributed to turning perfectly capable people into those who cannot read, write or speak well even after graduation. In India, companies looking for entry level employees find it hard to choose one out of a thousand applicants at times. In other words, what is there has not worked in providing education that has any meaning beyond a very basic literacy with letters.
Giving them OLPC laptops, not just any computer, transforms their world beyond what a teacher and a regular computer could achieve together. My experience is that wherever we have OLPC deployed, virtually anyone visiting those schools has almost had an "spiritual" experience of what learning learning can be. How children can be engaged in learning by themselves, as a class and engage the teachers as well. We have seen the teachers who used to be absent not only come to the schools, they like to learn with children and grow. Let us not forget that the teachers typically know very little when the are appointed as teachers and they also know little about the world they are not exposed to. OLPC laptops become their first opportunity to get engaged with learning without leaving their environment and for no cost. It transforms the school from a place where children are forced to go into a place they don't want to go away from.
A laptop for very child is much more powerful incentive to learn both with and without teachers than the way education is imparted today. OLPC helps take the children and their teachers from the world of "rote" to critical thinking and problem solving from day one. It bridges the gap between the potential and where the reality of the villages is- firmly a century or more behind the times we live in.
Zunia: With the Indian Government now heavily funding and promoting it’s own $35 Akash tablet project, what is the future of OLPC in India? What is the OLPC’s official stand in this regard?
Satish Jha: The Indian Government is not "heavily" funding "Aakash" yet because "Aakash" is not yet a stable product and the state governments are aware of that. It is the central government's aspiration to produce a cheap laptop or tablet and that has taken them 5 years from moving the target from $10 to $35 and actually offering something that costs $60 and the reviews are as disappointing as anyone with any sense of computers may have expected. What is being offered as Aakash can be bought in the Asian market for a little less and does not meet most of the requirements of education and that is the reason little tangible has happened with it yet.
It will be unfortunate if children are saddled with a dysfunctional device that has little to do with education or learning. So our approach is to help everyone understand that in the context of education, Aakash as an aspiration is little different from Plan Ceibal (which also means Aakash) of Uruguay. But Uruguay focused on education. India is focusing on a device. However, education is hardly about a device. It requires a whole ecosystem to be developed. OLPC offers that like nothing so far in our evolution. I volunteer for OLPC because I see what it does for the underprivileged children where nothing else works. We would love to support the government think through the issue and see the merits of OLPC approach and offer it as an opportunity they need to understand and explore rather than as a sale. OLPC does not sell a computer. It offers an opportunity to transform education unlike what has been achieved in the 65 years of freedom from colonial yokes. It offers an opportunity for every Indian, no matter how poor or remotely located, to become who he or she can become unlike any other device that will at best be a device for some use for those who may use it.
Zunia: Please share with us some challenges and failures you encountered in implementing the OLPC project in India that other countries can learn from.
Satish Jha: To understand OLPC requires seriousness about knowing what countries are missing out on by not transforming their education. The leaders who see OLPC as a "vaccine against ignorance" will transform their entire population in 15 years into people of unfathomable capabilities. Leaders who are looking for devices will continue to keep the pace most developing countries have shown since the last world war. The biggest challenge from the Indian experience are as follows:
OLPC requires resources to even evangelise. Its too large a job for a few folks to run with. For each population segment of 10 million people or a million children, a center of excellence for 10,000 children that demonstrates the transformational capabilities of OLPC can help take it to the next stage. In other words, just like OLPC raised resources to create OLPC, it may do well by raising resources to diffuse its use.
Governments need to start experimenting with OLPC before concluding without experience and they should all not only visit, spend some time as well in Uruguay, Peru, Rwanda and the schools in India like the ones in Khairat near Mumbai, Keekerwali in Rajasthan, Udaan Schools in Uttarakhand, Katha in Delhi, among others.
All Governments should set aside 2% of their budget towards innovation in education and look for projects with more holistic approach rather than patchwork approach.
Large countries like India need to realise that technologies are not bounded by geographies and they are created by humans for everyone to use regardless of nationalities and communities of interest. They cannot be created within the boundaries of a nation any more. Its in creating a culture of "global knowledge, local solutions" rather than "local knowledge, local solutions" that we can help the next generation of humanity to reap the benefits of human progress.
Zunia: Lastly, some say it’s a silly argument while some consider it a matter of prejudice. Why must the XO laptops look so different from ordinary laptops? ‘Shoe-box’ and ‘bricks’ are the two things XO laptops are most frequently said to look like! While branding of a product is certainly an important issue, don’t the poor children deserve something that doesn’t instantly differentiate them from the privileged ones? Isn’t it just another form of (digital) divide?
Satish Jha: I think the world is being doubly unfair to the underprivileged. In the modern times. it did little for their education in any meaningful way until OLPC made it possible. OLPC will help even the privileged children become a lot more creative and help them engage in critical thinking and problem solving way more than they do now. But that aside, by looking different, it gives them their identity. Why does children's bicycle look different from the grown-ups'? Why does anything that relates to children look like what it does. So on the one hand they say its too expensive for the poor and on the other they find it too cheap for their children. Clearly those arguing have not tried OLPC first hand and have not explored it. If they did, they will have better things to say.
OLPC is a computer for "learning learning". There are professors of computer science in the University of California system who use it as their primary computer. There are professors of physics at Ivy League schools who use it as their second computer. So the glib comments come from who have not even tried it out. I have heard about OLPC looking like a lunch box but never the shoebox or brick until your question. So, I would say that when the Government of Peru makes OLPC laptop the sculpture at the gate of its Education Ministry, that answers to them all. When Uruguay takes OLPC to every child, rich or poor, to learn with OLPC that is an answer to those skeptics.
Anyone who suggests anything about OLPC without actually trying it out the way it is supposed to is being reactive for reasons they need to understand better and share as well. Observers also need to have, as Americans would say, their "skin in the game". That said, OLPC laptops offer what no other computer does today. So as we speak, there is no real point of comparison either. I sincerely hope that there will be some other approaches that make computers for learning that are more valuable and cost effective. As of now, the opponents of OLPC offer cheap devices without anything that addresses the questions as to why have computers not reached the villages and the poor and why is there so much ignorance around despite so much progress that mankind has achieved!
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Satish Jha, Chairman, Pinewood Partners, is a volunteer for One Laptop per Child movement and is the founder and chairman of OLPC India Foundation. Earlier he worked as the Editor of Newsweekly Dinamaan of The times of India Group and Co-founded the national Hindi daily "Jansatta" for The Indian Express Group. In the field of technology and management, he started out as the Head of Global Information Systems for the Vitamins Division of Hoffmann-La Roche and was later Chairman and Managing Director of James Martin & Co Pvt Ltd.
He has worked at the intersection of technology and development for the past couple decades and co-founded, seeded and/or mentored several organizations including FREND, tarahaat.com, eHealth-care, Drishtee, Digital Partners India, Baramati conference, DESI Power and has been associated with World IT Forum (WITFOR) as a co-chair and chairman of its Economic Opportunities Commission, UN-GAID and the Kofi Annan Center in Ghana, among others. He has also been associated with TiE as a Charter Member for a decade, co-founded TiE Pune and was on the Board of TiE Washington DC.
He studied economics at Jawahar Lal Nehru University (JNU), international affairs at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Science Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Foreign Policymaking at University of Maryland, Political Economy and Development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and earned an MBA from EDHEC, France.
He has been published in and interviewed, among others, by The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CNN and is a columnist for Dainik Bhaskar, the largest circulated Hindi newspaper in India.
D C on January 10, 2012
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The larger issue is why has India not embraced it.
I feel the reasons may be as follows:
Someone in the Education Ministry of India took a dislike for MIT Media Lab and Negroponte and he was the key man sitting on top of the ICT Mission in Education. That explains why India has dumb projects like ICT@School that create labs with N Computing and Vendors who provide servers and everyone agrees that no one other than the vendors benefits from the program. But no one in India thinks outside the box. Those in Government make decisions based on their understanding which is dated and they do not know any better.
Sam Pitroda, a man who delayed the telecom revolution in India just to feel a sense of power and was smart enough to be called the \"father of telecom revolution\" has been opposing OLPC because it has name of Negroponte. Pitroda is known for nothing creative but gets award for being an innovation guru by The Economist. He recently praised Akash on the day it was being trashed by its sponsors after innumerable complaints. His choices have always been questionable. But he is smart in being a self-serviing man will call a donkey his father if that serves his goal. I say so because the guy will not listen to reason.
Negroponte has not been listening to the needs of India either and he does not have to. But he wants to take OLPC forward in India, he will have to fund some significant demonstration site, support his India team with an aggressive PR network, have a team of a dozen passionate social media guys and listen to the state governments by putting there a team of couple of people each.
Satish Jha is playing solo and he has been persuading, remaining visible and battling with the government like no one will or humanly can even in a democracy when the Government of India has gone for what a media blitz that has kept ramming Akash down the throat of every Indian and every government outside of India.
Now that there are cracks in the Akash story with so many people trashing it publicly and the Government announcing to shelve Akash 1 and moving on to Akash 2 which will be twice as powerful, still half as underpowered and will have none of the benefits of OLPC.
Diffusion is about pragmatism as much as creating something as innovative as OLPC is about a grand vision with a great capacity to make it happen.
Hope Negroponte starts out by donating 10,000 or more OLPC XO 3.0 and create the buzz it needs to get India\'s leaders begin to see beyond the follower mindset they have.
Sam is a newcomer to the field. I started in 1965 when I first went to work in a Chilean university computer center.
Perhaps it is my own feeling that I am only beginning to touch the potential of the technology in my teaching, as I assign readings to my graduate students from the Internet or from the university computer network, draw on presentations from Europe for specific classes, communicate with the students via email, using power point and gapminder for class sessions, etc. But i still feel that a century from now, people will wonder about how primitive our use of technology is today as a means to help students learn and as a means of making the world of information available and accessible to the student.
I also give considerable credit to all the people who have spent time and effort making the technology useful in the schools of poor countries.
I first learned about computers when I learned to program the SWAC in 1954. One could criticize that machine, and I certainly did at the time, but it was the best that people came up with working hard and seriously. It may have been the only computer for a large university in its day, but it had less computer power than my watch! Still it was a start!
Interesting comments re: my comments and OLPC, but not amusing. As someone who has been \"in the trenches\" dealing with ICT and development since the early 1980\'s, and on the ground in numerous countries I should have expected to be a lightening rod for ad hominem attacks when raising questions about the OLPC program. That seems to come with the territory. OLPC is one of the few initiatives where the device itself almost has \"true believer\" status. Progress involves adaptive systems, not inserted devices.
We hear the aggregate device claims over and over again, but would like to see some concrete objective evidence that OLPC is resulting in sustainable educational systems strengthening, something quite different from how many devices have been dropped in this or that location.
Evidence based assertions are preferred to ad hominum attacks. We keep seeing \"new and improved\" versions of the technology, when what we would like to see is new and improved systems of measurement, monitoring and evaluation. But, I guess that it is easier to produce lightening and thunder. Oh well, working in the trenches all those years one\'s lightening arrestor continues to work, as the work goes on
That is your job to go to Uruguay and monitor and evaluate. Come to Khairat, Keekerwali, Uttarakhand and see and monitor and evaluate. Why do you want OLPC to do all for the world and you keep sitting in some corner commenting without making any effort? Please be honest, go and observe with an open mind and not make observations that have no legs.
This is hilarious! You say you\'ve funded the OLPC project. So I\'m assuming you have spent some time in a donor agency and have, at least, the minimum understanding of monitoring and evaluation (M & E).
Have u ever heard any Government department or donor agency to ask the civil society to perform monitoring and evaluation of any project that they are responsible to implement? Isn\'t it the responsibility of the implementing agency to justify their own project and funding decisions through M & E? Of course, the civil societies are also stakeholders of the M&E process but that doesn\'t relieve you from your responsibilities to show results - whether positive or negative - they are all learning we need as development workers.
..\"That is your job to go to Uruguay and monitor and evaluate...\"!!! For crying our loud, it\'s people like you Dave who need to be honest, monitor, evaluate and prove the results of your claims with an open mind and not make comments that have no legs. Because it doesn\'t matter how much noise you make about the success of OLPC, without the support of the society as a whole, you will go nowhere.
I am surprised at your bias Anushka. Why do you think Uruguay got every child to use OLPC? Because it had no support of the society?
I am honest. I put my money on my honesty. May be you work for a living and earn from M&E. M&E is useful when I give my money to people to decide where they should put it. In absence of that, money may not be directed optimally. An objective M&E may help because the donor may not have time to attend to where the money goes. When the donor directly decides, there is little need for M&E because donors are leaders and they know what they are doing with their money.
You do not even recognize the fact that ideas are moved forward by visionaries and leaders and not by M&E folks who come ten generations after an idea first surfaces.
Before critiquing anyone we should be honest that we have done our home work. Its not my job to feed the M&E industry that comes back with the observation that if you feed the poor, their health improves.
If you are fond of M&E and do not believe you have the experience, the judgment, the vision, the leadership to understand how far it will go, please go and do M&E.
How about having asked Gandhi please let us know the ROI of your nationalist struggle and show how will a free India be so much better than it is now before you start your movement?
The difference is that those who lead do not necessarily need a degree. Those who need a job, do. I am speaking from experience and Sam seems to be talking from a distance, theoretically and that is not very nice.
Dave is painting the picture of M&E with a broad, dirty brush. I too find a lot of M&E reports state the obvious that the people who designed projects in the first place should have known before designing any development project (and often did not know). Indeed, a lot of M&E reports simply give the opinions of the authors with a rationalization to fill out the paper and make it look like they have done something.
On the other hand, having managed a lot of projects myself, I have sometimes found evaluations to be insightful and helpful in improving affairs. Good M&E is invaluable. The people who bother Dave are likely to be those who depend on \"methods\" rather than expert knowledge of that of which they speak and deep thought about what they see.
By the way, I am the manager of the M&E group on Zunia, and invite readers to join and participate.
John,
You mentioned Simputer in the same breath as OLPC and that is, in my experience, as good as saying Bob Dole, Walter Mondale and other Presidents of America..
Simputer was a an interesting idea, marketed well that never got productionised. There is no record of how many were sold and if it crossed a couple thousand pieces, that was a miracle.
In contrast, OLPC is in some 50 odd countries, a few million children have been using it and at least one country on the planet claims that every single child there is learning with OLPC.
Does that not put a question mark on all the naysayers observations?
I feel some sympathy for both Sam Lanfranco\'s position and Satish Jha\'s. We are still a long way from realizing the potential of low cost computers and software that help school children to learn. On the other hand, I see the Simputer and the OLPC as steps on the journey towards that end.
Think about how much interest had developed in the question of how computers should be used by children in the classroom and at home. Think about how much effort has gone into developing designs for computers that are affordable for poor school systems in poor countries, rugged enough to last children for years, usable with week infrastructure, and designed for children not only to use but to like. Think about the degree to which people in India and other developing countries have come to see the development of this technology as a problem that they can and must attack themselves.
The pioneers in a field seldom actually solve the problems that they hope to solve themselves, but without them, where would we be?
By any objective standards the OLPC initiative has not been a success, and it has not been a success for the very reasons that were raised when it was first proposed. It has, through marketing and connections, been adopted and tried in a variety of settings but what little assessment that has taken place points to the early standard criticisms. It is not a substitute for improved teacher resources, especially when existing teachers are not able to use the technology themselves. It is a costly approach since purchase price is a small fraction of the overall costs of a technology enhanced curriculum, and funding is usually not there. When there is limited and temporary \"success\" it is typically for a \"poster school\" or for a privileged school setting.
As for the role of ICT 4/in Development, the cell phone, cheap computers and tablets, and increasingly the smart phone, bring more value-added to not just education, but to health, governance, etc. and have wider adoption and use. There was a point at which OLPC looked like it was going to \"grow up\" and stop being a one note (one item) initiative, and take the challenges of education seriously. Dealing with teacher training and work conditions would have been a good start. Instead, it continues to complain that its critics are ill-motivated or poorly informed.
If there is one factor that stands out in the history of OLPC it is the initiative\'s colossal inability to learn from its own mistakes, and inability to learn from the critiques of others. That is pretty sad for what claims to be an educational initiative that is increasingly being marginalized by those failures, and by the very technologies which it tried to run with.
Clearly you may not have a first hand experience of OLPC. I do have and I support the program as a donor, as someone interested in helping children learn as best as they can.
From what I have seen, each of the doubts raised by Sam Lanfranco sounds imaginary. It may help to visit Uruguay where there are no pilots any more and EVERY child is on the plan. And it did not happen overnight. It took a sustained approach, a step at a time, an order at a time, a school at a time and by learning from each step and rolling that into the next steps.
Every point Lanfranco makes is imaginary, sounds like visualised sitting in a comfortable environment, logical with little relationship to what I have seen.
Altogether, in my opinion, OLPC is the CHEAPEST way to help a child LEAPFROG by GENERATIONS and become as competent as the child\'s interest will go.
Just peak to any of the teachers at OLPC schools in rural India, about before and after, and Sam will sound like someone who is paid to stand between the children and the future that is available to them now.
Its so unfortunate that the World Bank\'s education experts have spent so much time in India supporting NComputing over OLPC, they behave like the humble servants of its education policy planners who have ruined India\'s human potential by design, who are still imagining that they can create in India a $10 or $35 or $60 laptop or tablet that will have any meaning for education when they have nothing to show why anyone should trust any of their judgment?
Transformational technologies wait for visionaries. Paid analysts usually come in the way of any meaningful progress.
OLPC has done in 4 years more than nearly all alternative approaches tried in the past half a century to put together when it comes to helping a child go beyond what we can imagine even now.
When it comes to looking into the future, analysts often are constrained by the old lenses they use to look into the future. Please change your lenses.